by Mark Steyn:
"That's enough. That =96 that's a show of disrespect to me."
That was Barack Obama, a couple of weeks back, explaining why he was
casting the Rev. Jeremiah Wright into outer darkness. It's one thing
to wallow in "adolescent grandiosity" (as Scott Johnson of the
Powerline Web site called it) when it's a family dispute between you
and your pastor of 20 years. It's quite another to do so when it's the
60th anniversary celebrations of one of America's closest allies.
President Bush was in Israel the other day and gave a speech to the
Knesset. Its perspective was summed up by his closing anecdote =96 a
departing British officer in May 1948 handing the iron bar to the Zion
Gate to a trembling rabbi and telling him it was the first time in 18
centuries that a key to the gates of the Jerusalem was in the hands of
a Jew. In other words, it was a big-picture speech, referencing the
Holocaust, the pogroms, Masada =96 and the challenges that lie ahead.
Sen. Obama was not mentioned in the text. No Democrat was mentioned,
save for President Truman, in the context of his recognition of the
new state of Israel when it was a mere 11 minutes old.
Nonetheless, Barack Obama decided that the president's speech was
really about him, and he didn't care for it. He didn't put it quite as
bluntly as he did with the Rev. Wright, but the message was the same:
"That's enough. That's a show of disrespect to me." And, taking their
cue from the soon-to-be nominee's weirdly petty narcissism, Nancy
Pelosi, John Kerry, Joe Biden and Co. piled on to deplore Bush's
outrageous, unacceptable, unpresidential, outrageously unacceptable
and unacceptably unpresidential behavior.
Honestly. What a bunch of self-absorbed ninnies. Here's what the
president said:
"Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and
radicals, as if some ingenious argument will persuade them they have
been wrong all along. We have heard this foolish delusion before. As
Nazi tanks crossed into Poland in 1939, an American senator declared:
'Lord, if I could only have talked to Hitler, all this might have been
avoided.' We have an obligation to call this what it is =96 the false
comfort of appeasement, which has been repeatedly discredited by
history."
It says something for Democrat touchiness that the minute a guy makes
a generalized observation about folks who appease terrorists and
dictators the Dems assume: Hey, they're talking about me. Actually, he
wasn't =96 or, to be more precise, he wasn't talking onlyabout you.
Yes, there are plenty of Democrats who are in favor of negotiating
with our enemies, and a few Republicans, too =96 President Bush's pal
James Baker, whose Iraq Study Group was full of proposals to barter
with Iran and Syria and everybody else. But that general line is also
taken by at least three of Tony Blair's former Cabinet ministers and
his senior policy adviser, and by the leader of Canada's New
Democratic Party and by a whole bunch of bigshot Europeans. It's not a
Democrat election policy, it's an entire worldview. Even Barack Obama
can't be so vain as to think his fly-me-to-[insert name of enemy
here]concept is an original idea.
Increasingly, the Western world has attitudes rather than policies.
It's one thing to talk as a means to an end. But these days, for most
midlevel powers, talks arethe end, talks without end. Because that's
what civilized nations like doing =96 chit-chatting, shooting the
breeze, having tea and crumpets, talking talking talking. Uncivilized
nations like torturing dissidents, killing civilians, bombing
villages, doing doing doing. It's easier to get the doers to pass
themselves off as talkers then to get the talkers to rouse themselves
to do anything.
And, as the Iranians understand, talks provide a splendid cover for
getting on with anything you want to do. If, say, you want to get on
with your nuclear program relatively undisturbed, the easiest way to
do it is to enter years of endless talks with the Europeans over said
nuclear program. That's why that Hamas honcho endorsed Obama: They
know he's their best shot at getting a European foreign minister
installed as president of the United States.
Mo Mowlam was Britain's Northern Ireland secretary and oversaw the
process by which the IRA's Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness became
ministers of a Crown they decline to recognize. By 2004, she was
calling for Osama bin Laden to be invited to "the negotiating table,"
having concluded he was no different from Adams: Stern fellow, lots of
blood on his hands, but no sense getting on your high horse about all
that; let's find out what he wants and give him part of it.
In his 2002 letter to the United States, bin Laden has a lot of
grievances, from America's refusal to implement Sharia law to Jew-
controlled usury to the lack of punishment for "President Clinton's
immoral acts." Like Barack Obama's pastor, bin Laden shares the view
that AIDS is a "Satanic American invention." Obviously, there are
items on the agenda that the free world can never concede on =96
"President Clinton's immoral acts" =96 but who's to say most of the rest
isn't worth chewing over?
This will be the fault line in the post-Bush war debate over the next
few years. Are the political ambitions of the broader jihad
totalitarian, genocidal, millenarian =96 in a word, nuts? Or are they
negotiable? President Bush knows where he stands. Just before the
words that Barack Obama took umbrage at, he said:
"There are good and decent people who cannot fathom the darkness in
these men and try to explain away their words. It's natural, but it is
deadly wrong. As witnesses to evil in the past, we carry a solemn
responsibility to take these words seriously."
Here are some words of Hussein Massawi, the former leader of
Hezbollah:
"We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are
fighting to eliminate you."
Are his actions consistent with those words? Amazingly so. So, too,
are those of Hezbollah's patrons in Tehran.
President Reagan talked with the Soviets while pu****ng ahead with the
deployment of Cruise and Per****ng missiles in Europe. He spoke softly
=96 after getting himself a bigger stick. Sen. Obama is proposing to
reward a man who pledges to wipe Israel off the map with a
presidential photo-op to which he will bring not even a twig. No
wonder he's so twitchy about it.
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-C-
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